Monthly Archives: December 2013

Tom Coburn writes The Year Washington Fled Reality in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpts: The culture that Mr. Obama campaigned against, the old kind of politics, teaches politicians that repetition and “message discipline”—never straying from using the same slogans and…

American Thinker Posts for 2013 1/4/13 Stealing from Charites When charitable giving declines- and it certainly will- we can expect more class warfare rhetoric about how the selfish wealthy only give if the government gives them a deduction. But the…

A true liberal should be given to pause by the very idea of consensus, especially in a scientific realm. He should be given to pause by the preposterous idea of a 97% consensus on just about anything, especially one as…

“The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” Albert Camus “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with…

from Mark Perry at his blog Carpe Diem, The current state of the US economy explained in one chart: The fact that the US economy is producing 5.6% more output now than in 2007 with 2 million fewer workers…

Elitist bureaucrats have reams of academic qualifications, but lack the critical wisdom to understand their limitations. The best theoretical ideas are quickly frustrated by the political realities that create counterproductive favoritism, cronyism, and quickly confront the sacrifice of individual liberty…

Capitalism is the competition of ideas. Statist solutions are the opposite. Statist solutions would be better if they always picked the best ideas, but in the absence of competition we never know what the best ideas are. It is ironic…

Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog Sultan Knish, Government is Magic. Excerpts: Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won’t work because you want them to, they won’t work if you go through the motions, they will only work…

Daniel Greenfield writes in his blog The Sultan Knish, The Rise of the Mediacracy. Excerpts: The media is no longer informative, it is conformative. It is not interested in broadcasting events unless it can also script them. It does not…

Victor Davis Hanson writes 2017 and the End of Ethics in National Review Online: Excerpts: During the next presidency, will the filibuster still be bad, or will it suddenly be good again? Will there be a nuclear option again? Recess…

From Daniel Greenfield in his blog Sultan Knish, The Left is too Smart to Fail. Excerpts: The infrastructure of manufactured intelligence has become a truly impressive thing. Today as never before there is an industry dedicated, not to educating people,…

Alan Reynolds writes The Truth About the One Percent in The National Review Online Excerpt: The table shown here — which uses Piketty and Saez’s data — shows the top 1 percent’s average real income fell by 16.3 percent from 2007 to…

from The National Review Online Matthew Continetti writes The Inequality Business: Excerpts: It’s a funny thing about the inequality debate that has consumed the American intelligentsia for the past several years: The individuals who are most interested in identifying, describing,…

Most great entrepreneurs are less motivated by the money at the end of the trip than the hunt and the creative drive that needs to be fulfilled. But a creator also has help from venture capitalists and financial supporters that…

Daniel Greenfield writes The Poverty of Inequality in Sultan Knish. Excerpts: If you believe the left, the leading economic problem that Americans face today is not a lack of jobs or the cost of living, but a crisis of CEO salaries. If…

Scott Grannis posts in his blog, Calafia Beach Pundit, Tax Shares Update: In 2011, it took $389K or more of adjusted gross income to make it into the top 1% of income earners, and they paid 35% of all federal income…

“The simplest method is to begin with an opt-out provision for Social Security. People who understand the benefits of deferring consumption in order to invest for retirement should have the option to act on that knowledge using their own resources.…

From The Weekly Standard, Christopher Demuth writes The Silence of the Liberals: Collaterally, Obamacare is introducing a new form of government​—​improvisational government, characterized by continuous ad hoc revisions of statutory law by executive decree. This is a reversion to a…

From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish, The Miseducation of Education Reformers Selected excerpts ( please follow the link and read the entire piece) : It’s an article of faith that our schools are failing our children. But most educational reformers…